Outreach

Ministering to Missing Millennials

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

Long Road

Why are Millennials walking away from our churches? Why are a number of our own kids walking out the doors?  Why does the church seem impotent to change the direction of this rising tide?

While my wife and I are blessed to have all of our kids active in church, including our two college aged sons, who live six hours away, these are not unimportant questions to me.  I feel the blow every time I hear of the child of a friend, or church member, walking away.  They do not usually walk away angry.  Perhaps it might be better if they did.  All too often they walk away indifferent.  The faith of their fathers makes little difference to their lives – or so they feel.

There is no lack of suggestions. Most of those I hear involve, in one way or another, changing the church to meet the demands of the consumers the church desires to attract, or win back.  It works for McDonald’s, so why not the church?  But while there are things that the church can and should do better, the problem with suggestions toward such radical change is that it mistakes the mission of the church.  The church does not exist to cater to consumers.  The church should certainly not create consumers – though for the better part of the past couple generations that is exactly what we have done.  And now we are paying the price.  “Have it your way…” worked for Burger King. But the same message has left the church impotent to reach the present rising generation.

So how do we reach those who no longer see the value of the church?  That is a complex question.  But one thing we ought to do before deciding any course of action is to listen to some from this generation who have not left the church, and yet who love their peers.

A recent article I read titled Why the Church Isn’t Reaching My Un-churched Friends offers a refreshingly honest and thoughtful perspective.  Written by a twenty-something young lady from Louisville, Kentucky, she offers some candid critiques of both the cultural dilemma and the foolish things some – many – churches are trying in response.  Her criticisms are sharp, but not unnecessarily hurtful.  Her solutions: Authenticity. Christ.

While I do not propose to have the definitive answers, her suggestions are a great place to start.

Out-stretching the Outreach Dilemma

/ Dennis Griffith / 2 Comments

I have been spending some time thinking about how to revamp and ignite the outreach ministry of our church.  One of the frequent dilemmas for a church that desires to become more externally focused, more missional, is the balancing of service and PR.  There is nothing inherently wrong with advertising, but sometimes a sincere outreach can be perceived as a mere marketing strategy.  When this happens it sends a distorted message to both those outside the church and those who go out from the church.

John Stott, in his book Christian Mission in the Modern World, offers the following insights about this dilemma:

To sum up, we are sent to the world, like Jesus, to serve. For this is the natural expression of our love for our neighbors. We love. We go. We serve. And in this we have (or we should have) no ulterior motive. True, the gospel lacks visibility if we merely preach it, and lacks credibility if we who preach it are interested only in souls and have no concern about the welfare of people’s bodies, situations and communities.  Yet the reason for our acceptance of social responsibility is not primarily in order to give the gospel either a visibility or a credibility it would otherwise lack, but rather simple uncomplicated compassion. Love has no need to justify itself.  It merely expresses itself in service wherever it sees need.

Odyssey of Church Outreach

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

Outreach and evangelism are among the most important responsibilites the Christian has to his/her community. They are also perhaps the most intimidating. 

A friend of mine, who is not a pastor, took over the the outreach ministry of his church. He was aware at the outset that this ministry was in need of an ovehaul.  During the ‘heydays’ in this congregation most of the growth occured through transfers from neighboring churches experiencing turbualnt times. The church had never really cultivated a healthy outreach/evangelism ministry.  And recently this church had itself just emerged from a prolonged period of conflict. Consequently, little effort had been made in a few years to reach out to the community. Mere survival and self-preservation had been the prevailing mindset.  But the dust having settled, many in the church had been developing a renewed interest in their missional responsibility.

One of the first things my friend did was to take an informal survey of other members of the congregation.  What he found was somewhat unexpected.  Many of the members expressed a genuine willingness to reach out to the community.  This part was as he suspected.  But what surprised him was the nearly universal sense of inadequacy that the church members felt.   They would be willing – even anxious – to reach out to their neighbors.  They just didn’t think they knew how.  So they had never taken any initiative.

I don’t think this is an uncommon problem.  I remember my own experience.  As a Junior at the University of Tennessee the director of Athlete’s in Action, Doug Pollock, was mentoring me.  He suggested it was time I learned to do evangelism.  The idea of actually introducing others to a vital relationship with Jesus was exciting.  But it was also overwhelming.  Consequently I was paralyzed by the thought.  (I learned, by coercion – which I don’t recommend. Eventually, though, I faced my fears and began more freely sharing my faith – with varying effectivenss.) 

I also remember reading about the amazing beginnings of the Calvary Chapel movement. In the early days the founder of the movement, Chuck Smith, faced a congregation laced with fear of evangelism. He recognized this as a very common issue in most churches, and for most Christians. He also thought about the approach most pastors – including himself – employed to combat the paralysis: Guilt.  But as he re-diagnosed the problem a different solution came to mind.  He realized that the primary problem most people experienced was not a lack of desire, but a lack of confidence.  Guilt would not remedy this problem, only compound it.  Instead he realized that outreach needed to be modeled and taught. Smith believed that when the people grew in confidence that they would neither dishonor God nor destroy friendships in the process, evangelism would become natural and common.  And he was right! 

KEY CONCEPTS

Two key concepts to remember concerning evangelism are Intellectual and Incarnational. 

Intellectual deals with the content of the faith, an awareness of people (including ones self), and to some degree an understanding of the methods employed.  (Methods may not be the best word, because it seems to connote a formula. That is not my intention. But I’ll elaborate on methods in another post, which I hope will bring some clarity.) All of these things are important for effective evangelsim.  It will likely take the average person a little work to develop a competent grasp of these things. But while the old saying is true: “nothing worth doing is easy”, these things are not as complicated as many seem to think.

Incarnation means “in the flesh”.  It is used uniquely of the person and ministry of Christ. But it is also applies appropriately, I believe, to the followers of Christ who are commissioned to carry on his work on earth.  Jesus himself said: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” (John 20.21) 

Jesus’ statement requires us to ask oursleves: “Just how did the Father send Jesus?”  When we understand the answer to that question we have a picture of what Jesus intends for his followers, his church.  And without trying to oversimplify the doctrine of the Incarnation, we must understand that fundamentally it means the Father sent Jesus “in the flesh”. (See Philippians 2.5-8, John 1.14). Or as Eugene Peterson wonderfully puts it: “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.”

While it is important to recognize that Christ is unique in his Incarnation, and that there are aspects that cannot be replicated, it is also important to recognize that he has conferred an incarnational mandate upon his followers. We are commissioned to live and proclaim our faith in our neighborhoods.  Media may provide some helpful tools in the work of evangelism, but it is no substitute for living out our faith in the midst of both other believers and non-believers.  To do what Jesus commissioned us to do, to act as Jesus acted, we must “move out into the neighborhood”. We cannot stay behind the fortress-like doors of the church and simply invite select people to visit us there.

OBSTACLES

The two “I’s” – Intellect & Incarnation – are import, inseparable, and inconvertible.  Understanding these concepts is a good start. But we also need to be aware that there are obstacles that need to be addressed if we want to experience frutiful evangelism, and have effective outreach from our churches

In the couse of subsequent posts, I  will address six common obstacles that hinder Christians, and churches, from effectively

1. Lack of Understanding of the Gospel

2. Prayerlessness

3. People Blindness

4. Outdated Methods

5. Timidity

6. Motives